Technical headache
Vincent Hargaden moved house in August 2007 and decided to shop around for a new phone and broadband provider. He opted for BT’s Broadband & Talk package. “The appropriate confirmation of service and router duly arrived, at which point the grief started. I was able to get a dial tone on the phone, but on pressing the fifth digit on any outgoing call, was disengaged. Incoming calls had a ringing tone, but not in the house,” he says.
Over a six-week period he had many calls logged with BT customer service but they never seemed to have any history of his previous complaints and failed to come up with a solution. Having spoken to some third party telecoms engineers, he realised the problem was at the exchange.
“But BT technical support didn’t want to know. When I threatened to terminate my contract, I got a supervisor, who was apologetic but basically shrugged her shoulders and said there was nothing she could do. I promptly cancelled my contract in writing and requested my bank to cancel the direct debit.”
But not before BT had managed to process the first bill, including installation charges of more than €200. He says that further written complaints and demands for a refund went unanswered and a second bill for €92 arrived which was passed to BT’s account collections department “culminating in a rather sinister phone call two weeks ago from BT as to why I was refusing to pay. The individual didn’t want to know about the history of the technical fault . . . the tone of the call left me in no doubt that they would do whatever was necessary to collect the debt.”
He contacted ComReg who were “extremely helpful” and told him to make a formal complaint to BT, which, if unanswered within 10 working days, would allow ComReg to pursue the matter. “Needless to say the 10 working days expired last Friday with no response from BT.”
We contacted BT and a spokeswoman said the company “always welcomes customer feedback”. She expressed BT’s “sincere apologies to Mr Hargaden for any inconvenience caused” and confirmed that “we have been in contact with Mr. Hargaden to thoroughly review his issues and appropriate actions have been taken to resolve them.”
Its a sad state of affairs when relatively simple issues like this require the intervention of comreg. Considering all the time wasted (by both parties) surely it cant be in the interest of companies like BT to keep fobbing people off? They’ll still need to address the issue at some point but rather then getting it sorted at the start by spending 30mins looking into the issue they instead bounce around departments wasting staff and customer time. In the long term they’ve probably lost numerous man hours and a potential customer.
I had an issue last year with trying to get a phone line released from Smart (it was in the name of an existing tenant). Took six months, many phone calls, and a comreg intervention to sort out. In the end a brief 5min call from a ‘manager’ in smart sorted out the whole thing.
Amusingly enough smart kept sending bills to the existing tenant for a few months afterwards and now have sent debt collection letters. Even though I’ve told them numerous times that the previous owner has left the country.
Comment by David Greene | February 19, 2008 at 3:38 pmBaffling.
David, it always amazes me how quickly and easily most of these problems are to resolve when the will is there. I will never understand why so many companies - and not just BT and Smart - seem totally incapable of resolving so many problems until someone from the press comes calling. It’s bonkers.
Comment by Conor | February 19, 2008 at 4:36 pmWow. I’m looking into who to get as my phone’n'broadband provider at the moment, and this has really changed my view of BT. It just goes to show, if you treat customers badly, it can and will come back to you in the form of lost business. The sad part is that ultimately this is the cost of privatisation, where cheaper costs and more choice also mean distributed and very demarcated areas of responsibility, and little accountability! I hate to say it but I might be forced to go with Eircom, just as they’re more likely to have access to the physical infrastructure if something goes wrong - unless that’s likely to separate out? Anyone know?
Comment by Mike | February 19, 2008 at 9:59 pm